Potomac Man Charged With Tax Evasion

A Potomac cardiologist has been indicted on federal income tax evasion charges in United States District Court for Maryland in Greenbelt.

Pradeep Srivastava, 46, faces charges of evading more than $16 million dollars in income taxes for the 1998 and 1999 tax years.

A federal grand jury delivered the indictment under seal Oct. 12 and it was unsealed in court Oct. 19.

SRIVASTAVA, who had offices in Greenbelt and Oxon Hill, appeared before Magistrate Judge Jillyn K. Schulze and was released on his own recognizance.

“Anyone who thinks it is safe to evade taxes should think again, because the IRS and the Department of Justice are working to find tax cheats and send them to federal prison,” United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said in a statement.

The three-count indictment charges Srivastava with income tax evasion and filing a false income tax return.

A statement released by the United States Attorney’s Office in Baltimore gave the following account of Srivastava’s actions, as alleged in the indictment:

During the technology boom of the late 1990s, Srivastava earned more than $40 million in short-term capital gains, much of them from trading in stock options involving high-technology stocks such as America Online, Dell Computer, Yahoo, Qualcomm and Inktomi. In preparation for filing his tax returns for 1998 and 1999, Srivastava provided his accountant with information about those trades that generated capital losses, but is alleged to have omitted providing information relating to the vast majority of his short-term capital gains. Srivastava then filed tax returns which omitted those capital gains and, according to counts one and two of the indictment, understated his tax due by $164,756 in 1998 and $16,179,567 in 1999.

The indictment further alleges that in 2000, the value of Srivastava’s portfolio collapsed and he incurred massive capital losses. Disclosure of the full extent of those losses, however, would have potentially alerted the Internal Revenue Service to his massive, undisclosed short-term capital gains for 1998 and 1999. Count three of the indictment alleges that Srivastava filed a false tax return which understated his capital losses for 2000.

THE MAXIMUM penalty for tax evasion is five years imprisonment, a $250,000 fine and three years supervised release. The maximum sentence for filing a false income tax return is three years in prison.